A Brief History of Seven Killings
CBC Books | Posted: July 12, 2018 9:29 PM | Last Updated: November 8, 2019
Marlon James
On December 3, 1976, just before the Jamaican general election and two days before Bob Marley was to play the Smile Jamaica Concert to ease political tensions in Kingston, seven unnamed gunmen stormed the singer's house, machine guns blazing. The attack wounded Marley, his wife and his manager, and injured several others. Little was officially released about the gunmen, but rumours abounded regarding the assassins' fates. A Brief History of Seven Killings is James's fictional exploration of that dangerous and unstable time in Jamaica's history and beyond. Deftly spanning decades and continents and peopled with a wide range of characters — assassins, drug dealers, journalists and even ghosts — James brings to life the people who walked the streets of 1970s Kingston, who dominated the crack houses of 1980s New York and who reemerged into a radically altered Jamaica of the 1990s. (From Riverhead Books)
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From the book
Listen.
Dead people never stop talking. Maybe because death is not deat at all, just a detention after school. You know where you're coming from and you're always returning from it. You know where you're going though you never seem to get there and you're just dead. Dead. It sounds final but it's a word missing an ing. You come across men longer dead than you, walking all the time though heading nowhere and you listen to them howl and hiss because we're all spirits or we think we are all spirits but we're all just dead. Spirits that slip inside other spirits. Sometimes a woman slips inside a man and wails like the memory of making love. They moan and keen loud but it comes through the window like a whistle or a whisper under the bed, and little children think there's a monster. The dead love lying under the living for three reasons. (1) We're lying most of the time. (2) Under the bed looks like the top of a coffin, but (3) There is weight, human weight on top of that you can slip into and make heavier, and you listen to the heart beat while you watch it pump and hear the nostrils hiss when their lungs press air and envy even the shortest breath. I have no memory of coffins.
From A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James ©2013. Published by Riverhead Books.